Unless these technology companies can start agreeing to 'standards' instead of 'ownership' NFC and a myriad of other exceptional technologies will never find their way to the public. Scale, not exclusivity creates the greatest opportunity financial gain for all parties.

I am starting to see these lawsuits and infighting as grinding the gears and seriously slowing the forward progress of technology for market.

I think you are pointing at serious problem: There is a culture among many computer geeks that music, computer games, books etc should be for free and that the main challenge in getting a degree at university is not getting caught when copying other people's works.

We now have a part of a generation who believe stealing is only limited to physical objects and that IP is for free. It really gets absurd when a possible theft is compared to acquiring a company to broaden your IP basis.

It's not that IP is free. It's the idea that knowledge itself should not be put into IP. Just look at this example, let's assume Paypal is the compnay who first created this whole ecosystem of mobile payment etc (even though it's not true), if the society allows this to be put into IP, only Paypal and Paypal alone can sell products related to it because everyone else would be forbidden to create that without being sued (don't tell me you can license it because obv Paypal would want to keep the monopoly profit in this case). Then the whole society suffers for like 10-20 years because there won't be any competition when the IP is still active.

As for this particular lawsuit, I disagree that an employee should not be allowed to share his/her knowledge acquired in 1 job and use that in his/her next job. The way to protect the companies from losing secret is to actually just continue to innovate so that the secret quickly become useless over time. Or you do a better job keeping the key people who know your secret.

Meh. This is like IBM suing Apple over the hiring of Mark Papermaster. Apple was right then. Google is right now.

It's one thing to claim that you own the proprietary information in a person's head. But some companies seem to think they own every bit of that person's talent, in perpetuity, if the individual worked for them.

Methinks Paypal is just bitter that they couldn't conclude a deal with Google over getting their platform on Android. Instead Google obviously saw two visionary employees and hired them. Now Paypal is bitter that they aren't the ones executing the vision of these employees (and Beider is apparently a huge talent in the NFC business). They are bitter somebody else is capitalizing on Beider talents. I seriously doubt this has anything serious to do with misappropriated IP. Unless Paypal was planning on releasing a platform for contactless payments. Anybody here anything about that in the last little while?

I hope this means you're volunteering to be part of the 80%, cause I don't plan to!

I'm not saying I disagree with their assessment, but when you cut through all the mumbo-jumbo of the venus project, this is their core principle. In other words, you start with a pristine world, and only let a select few people live there. At that point you have eliminated 99% of the problems so 'arriving' at appropriate decisions of how to manage that world is much easier to do. Clearly, that is currently impossible on this planet.

Google is going to get the book thrown at them in court. This is so bad on so many levels. Google is going to pay a hefty fee for this assuming this is true. If/When they loose I wonder if the judgement is going to be spectacular.

Keywords: "assuming this is true".

Somehow I don't think (for all the allegations here), Google is "evil" enough and the two former PayPal employees stupid enough to both break their NDAs, flat out steal IP and then become the public face of a new platform for their new employer. People who suggest Google "stole" PayPal's IP are essentially implying that these two employees are equally indiscrete and stupid. However, "evil" Google is or is not, I find it hard to believe that, not just one, but two former PayPal employees would could court legal problems so readily.

More than likely, it seems to me that these two folks had a vision beyond PayPal and Google offered to back them (and benefit in the process). After all, show me serious evidence that PayPal was on its way to launching contact-less payment. Does anybody have any?

Could it just be that PayPal is pissed because they don't get to be the backend of Google Wallet and that this thing might just threaten their position as the most trusted brand in mobile payments?

Every engineer in the world should collaborate together and build the best for humanity, not competing and suing each other like it would benefit anyone at all.

You win the most ignorant statement of the day award. What right do you have to expect engineers or anyone else to work for free?! The mere thought is so staggeringly arrogant and selfish there really are no polite words adequate to express how degenerate your thoughts are. Suffice it to say you are an enemy of freedom and individual rights.

Meh. This is like IBM suing Apple over the hiring of Mark Papermaster. Apple was right then. Google is right now.

Except for two things - Papermaster was not allowed to work for Apple on the same stuff he worked for at IBM and he left Apple shortly afterward. If Apple was right, it certainly didn't work out the way they planned.

Except for two things - Papermaster was not allowed to work for Apple on the same stuff he worked for at IBM and he left Apple shortly afterward. If Apple was right, it certainly didn't work out the way they planned.

Google really should just stick to search.

Meh. Papermaster's employment was close enough. And the lawsuit was incredibly similar, claiming that Papermaster had strategic knowledge....just like PayPal is claiming about it's two ex-employees now.

Read the complaint by paypal. It's ridiculous. It passes off opinion as fact. It reads like fanboy tripe. For example, it asserts that Google Checkout is a way for Google collect information. That maybe so, but it's also a functional payment platform, a fact that's more important to the topic at hand, and conveniently ignored in the complaint. They claim expertise in mobile/web payments, ignoring the fact that Google had a Chrome extension a year ago that allowed merchants to accept payments via Google Checkout.

Their only reasonable argument is that Bedier apparently held data on his personal email and Dropbox, while he worked at Paypal (I'm more inclined to think he was using this just to do work). If that's true, they'd have to prove that Google incited him to steal IP, and then used the same IP to develop Google waller. A tall order given that he's only been at Google for 3 months. He must be superman to develop, code and deploy an entire platform in that short a timeframe. Stolen IP or not (and keep in mind we still don't know what data was apparently "stolen"....could have been his dinner receipts).

I think PayPal's shaking in their shorts and they're resorting to lawsuits to prevent this thing from catching on. Google wallet is much more than a payment system like PayPal. It's a literal replacement for you wallet. Credit cards, loyalty cards, coupons, paytags, etc. All could be put into the Google Wallet. In the future you could do driver's licenses, hotel keys, etc. With that kind of functionality, PayPal is finished. And they know it. If I could use my credit card through Google Wallet and my credit card or Google Card through Google Checkout (bound to get more popular now), why would I use PayPal? Moreover, Google is not taking a cent from any of the transactions. This will attract partners to their platform. This is why PayPal is scared. They're also pissed to lose a talent like Bedier, and they want to intimidate him, just like IBM did with Papermaster, telling him to think of his children.